


Five and Skirts

by BeigeBagels



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: How Do I Tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 11:32:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19356199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeigeBagels/pseuds/BeigeBagels
Summary: Five and his wanting to wear a skirt.Rated Teen for language.Never posted on AO3 before, I dont know how to do anything. How do I tag??? I legit don't fucking know. I'm using mobile and I dont know how to?? Middle align it or italicize or anything. So. Fuck me I guess.





	Five and Skirts

**Author's Note:**

> What up I'm Reese I'm [REDACTED] and I never fucking learned how to use AO3 correctly. Might add more onto this story later, if I ever figure out fuCKING HOW.

Ever since they were little, Four and Six used to spirit themselves away into one of their rooms during free time.

Five was never invited to come, and he never asked to come, either. He would spend his free time reading, or listening to Seven play her violin, or doing some independent training with his powers. Sometimes, very occasionally, he would watch TV with Two or Three, and only if he was bored with reading and Seven wasn't playing her violin.

But one time, when they were all around ten or eleven, Five had gone up to Six's room in order to return a book he had borrowed. He hadn't enjoyed it very much- he and Six had wildly different tastes. Five enjoyed nonfiction books about science or history, and while Six was able to stomach those sorts of genres, Five noticed that he preferred fiction.

Five heard muffled conversation through the door, so he figured that the two of them were more than likely in there. He had seen One and Two arguing over something or another on the way up to Six's room while Three tried to play peacemaker, and he could head Seven's violin playing from her room, so the only logical explanation was that the muffled voices were Four and Six.

Five had barely paused to knock before entering, not even bothering to wait for a "Come in." He knew that the odds of Four being in the room were very high, but he didn't expect to stumble across the two of them lounging around, with Four wearing one of their sister's skirts.

Five froze and stared at his even numbered brothers, and they stared right back. Five slowly blinked, then mentally shook his head. Whatever his siblings did in their spare time didn't really matter, he shouldn't be surprised by any of their antics at this point. Especially Four, after the Hot Dog and Paper Mache Incident.

"Hey, Six, I've got your b-" Five squeaked as he was roughly and suddenly dragged in through the doorway by Four, who slammed the door behind him.

Five snatched his hand back like it burned, hissing out, "Four, what the heck?"

"You can't tell Mom or Dad about this." Five blinked at Six, who was staring at Five with the saddest doe eyes Five has ever seen.

"Wh-" Five started.

"Please don't," Four begged, also giving Five a pair of (much less effective, but still damn sad) doe eyes.

"If you do, Dad will never let him wear one again!" Six sounded a little panicked at this.

"And they're really comfy, Five, you won't believe. It's like, wow, I never knew I could get this comfortable without being completely naked," Four babbled nervously after Six. Five sighed heavily and held up his hand to stop them before they could continue their begging. It was making him uncomfortable.

"I'm not going to tell Dad," Five began.

"Or Mom," Four insisted.

"Or Mom," Five parroted. He tried to ignore how both Four and Six instantly slumped in relief. "But, like, why are you wearing girls' clothes?"Five asked Four, knitting his eyebrows together. "You're a boy." Boys wear boys clothes while girls wear girls clothes. It was just fact, like how the sky is blue or the grass is green or that E=MC^2.

"Well, actually," Six began to say, sitting down on his bed. "Four has been having some doubts about that."

"What?" Five asked, staring at Six. "You can't doubt being a boy. You're born a boy or a girl, you can't doubt that. I can't doubt having brown hair, it's brown. Unless I dye it or something."

"Why not?" Four asked, raising his chin. "I don't feel like a boy. Whenever somebody calls me a boy my skin feels itchy, and I feel like it's just- like it's not me. I'm not a boy," the green eyed child said with as much finality as possible.

Five was still confused, though.

"You're not- you can't not be a boy," he protested, rather lamely.

"Why not?" Four asked, crossing his arms.

"It's just- it doesn't make any sense," Five managed to say, shifting his weight.

"Actually," Six said, rising from his bed and walking towards one of his bookshelves, "I've been doing some reading, and I think he might be transgender." He pulled out a big book, an all black cover with a title that said Gender and Sexuality by S. R. Hollows. He handed Five the book, while taking back the sci-fi novel that Five had forgotten he was holding. Five stared down at the cover, and looked up at his two bro- siblings? Siblings, then.

"So if you're not a boy," Five said, "then you're a girl? Should I start calling you my sister? Call you she?" Four didn't really feel like a sister, in all honesty, but if it didn't make his "skin all itchy" then Five could learn to deal with it.

He was rather surprised when Four winced and shook his head.

"No, no, definitely not. I'm fine with being called he, I don't mind, but I'm definitely not a girl. But I'm not- I'm not a boy either." Four frowned.

"I've just been calling him my sibling, instead of brother or sister," Six admitted. Five paused.

"So you're not a girl or boy?" Five asked, getting a definitive nod in return. "So that's why you're wearing one of our sister's skirts," Five said. Four hesitated before nodding this time, and Five nodded back. That made sense, then. Five glanced down at the book that Six had handed him. Gender and Sexuality, huh? At least it wasn't another stupid sci-fi story, Five guessed.

"I'll return this later," Five promised Six, before scuttling back to his room.

\---

He read the whole book in two days, and spent the next week rereading and re-rereading it. He hadn't known that you could like boys if you were a boy, hadn't really thought about it if he were being honest. You could even like boys and girls, or "bisexual" as the book called it. Five didn't know why he was so happy to just reread the same book three times- usually he read a book as fast as he could while still absorbing the information so that he could read more books about the subject, but with this one...

He passed it off as it being the first he's ever heard of this subject, and returned the book back to Six after one more time rereading it. He could almost recite it word for word by now, anyways, so there was no reason to keep it.

Five still felt sad as he watched Six shelf it, though.

Neither Four nor Six mentioned Four's gender after that, except to inform him that Four now identified as "genderqueer". Five hadn't read that term in the book by Hollows, and Six had handed him another book called The Third Option by Jackie Cook.

This one Five read three times before giving it back.

Six handed him another book about sexuality and gender.

\---

Five had begun slowly but surely assimilating himself into Four and Six's schedules. He'd drop by Six's room to exchange a book, and end up talking with them for slowly amassing amounts of time. First five minutes, then ten, until he eventually spent at least an hour with them. Four would wear different clothes, sometimes a skirt, sometimes shorts, once or twice even wearing a dress that he had somehow obtained.

Five violently pushed back the little peak of envy that he felt at the corner of his mind every time he saw Four wearing a skirt. Boys don't wear skirts. Four wasn't a boy, but Five definitely was. He didn't feel itchy or wrong if someone called him a male, and wearing shorts and pants didn't feel bad or anything. He didn't have dysphoria,or euphoria, or anything like that. He was a boy, he knew he was a boy, and boys don't wear skirts.

But Five was oh so tempted to ask to borrow one of Four's skirts, but he never did ask, and while Four did offer, once, Five vehemently denied him. His pride wouldn't let him. Boys don't wear skirts, he didn't say to Four, but he did whisper to himself later that night while under his sheets, just before going to bed.

\---

Five stared at the burning world around him with a dull sadness that had long since faded into the back of his mind. He was trudging along, viciously kicking pieces of rubble that had the misfortune of being in his way, pulling along his wagon behind him.

His school boy shorts have long since been growing tight around his waist, and the shirts he had were definitely a few sizes too small by now. He didn't know how long it's been since he got stuck here, but Five was willing to wager he was at least fifteen or sixteen by now. He would need new clothes very soon, he couldn't continue on in the, frankly, rather uncomfortable clothes for much longer.

He remembered seeing an only partially destroyed clothing store around here somewhere…

Five found the ash covered sign of an old clothing store, and the entire left side of the building was absolutely destroyed. He picked his way through the rubble until he got to the part that was still standing, looking up from where he was carefully making his way through the pieces scattered about (he didn't want to cut himself on stray rubble again) and froze.

It was… the girl's section.

The girl's section was the only part of the clothing store that was still standing.

He stared blankly, and looked around wildly. Despite knowing for a fact that he was the only person left alive on Earth, he was still bitterly expecting someone to jump out and yell "Gotcha!", or something. Nobody jumped out, and he reluctantly made his way towards where the less feminine girls clothes were.

Even though this was the apocalypse, he was still a boy, and boys don't wear skirts, no matter how much he might want to…

He changed into some better fitting jeans and shirts, each rather androgynous-looking. He grabbed several pairs of pants and shirts, and began to leave before pausing and staring at the skirts and dresses. He gulped.

Boys don't wear skirts, but… why not? Because it's the way it's always been throughout history? History doesn't matter in the apocalypse, there's no one here except Five, Five shouldn't have to worry about what people thought of him when there were no people to think of him.

Five made up his mind, and grabbed some of the prettier looking skirts that fell just past his knees and tried them on. He paused to look at himself in a cracked and dirty full length mirror, turning his hips slightly and marveling at the way the fabric swished about his hips. He grinned, and spun around in a circle. He felt tipsy and light-headed, like how he felt after he'd drank a couple sips of that bottle of vodka he had found a few months ago.

He left that department store with more skirts than pants, and one dress, buried underneath all of the other fabric and supplies in his wagon.

\---

After he started working for the Commission, skirts weren't really much of an option anymore.

Assassination work always required a certain degree of stealth, surprisingly enough. And, throughout history, only girls wore skirts. The closest Five had got was when he had to kill a mark somewhere in Scotland and he got to wear a kilt. He had dragged that mission out for as long as he could (a week and a half) before the Commission got suspicious, screw the docked pay.

He didn't get much downtime between missions, but whenever he managed to get a few hours, maybe even a full day, to himself, he changed into something much more comfortable- namely, his skirts. Dolores always pleasantly encouraged him, telling him how his feelings were important, too, that he couldn't spend all of his life invested in stopping the apocalypse without giving himself a mental health break or two. Five had kissed her on the cheek and called her sweet, before being called away for another hit.

\---

When Five finally got back, back to the time where all of his siblings were still alive, all he wanted to do was give all of them a big hug and cry until he ran out of tears- but he couldn't.

He had to stop the apocalypse.

He pushed past his siblings and headed into the house, wanting to get out of his suddenly too big suit.

Five had opened his closet to reveal- the academy uniform. Oh, Five thought. Of course it would be the uniform. What else would it be? His skirts from the apocalypse? A fucking Santa Claus outfit?

He pushed down the feeling of disappointment that popped up (Go away, Five thought, you're illogical. I never had skirts before I got stuck, why would I suddenly have them now?) and changed into the uniform. He began to walk out his room, but paused… He jumped to Four's- Klaus', it was Klaus, Vanya's book had told him all of his siblings new names. He jumped to Klaus' rooms (thank God he wasn't there) and rummaged through his closet instead. He'd seen where Klaus had kept the skirts before, and as long as Klaus hasn't changed the hiding space, then-

Five pulled out a skirt, victorious. It was a slightly bigger one than Five remembered. Obviously; his siblings have all grown since he had gotten stuck. He frowned as he changed into it, it was too big around his hips. He glanced around Klaus' room, and noticed a pin. He smiled, pinned the skirt to better fit him, and beamed.

Sure, the skirt was awkward from where he'd pinned it, and instead of ending at or slightly above his knees it almost went down to his shins, but he doesn't remember the last time he felt this happy. He spun in a small circle, nodded at himself, then jumped to the kitchen to make himself a fluffernutter sandwich. He hasn't had one of those in a while.


End file.
